INTEGRATING RACIAL JUSTICE INTO HIGH-SCHOOL BIOLOGY CLASSROOMS

Science has been used to liberate society from sociologically as well as scientifically unsupported ideas. However, in the case of race, science has historically been the ultimate recourse for the justification of racial inequality and injustice. Evolutionary biology, however, explains the processes that give rise to biological diversity and in so doing, locates humanity in the biological world. Thus, if taught in conjunction with racial justice in high-school curricula, it affords a unique opportunity to tackle head-on questions about science and its relationship to race. We therefore propose that evolutionary biology and racial justice be taught simultaneously. Our rationale is threefold:

(1) A proper introduction to evolutionary biology and diversity reveals the specious underpinning of all claims of biological racial inequality; (2) High school is the first—and perhaps the most important—time when students are at a developmental stage to become aware of, to question, and to ultimately absorb concepts of social justice; and (3) the introduction of the fallacious science that has historically been used to justify racial inequality provides students with a powerful opportunity to understand and critique rigor in science.

Teachers may be concerned that there is not sufficient time for the introduction of racial inequities into biological curricula. However, a problem-based approach and the judicious insertion of examples involving race can exemplify many of the key evolutionary principles, including the nature of diversity: speciation and species, convergence, and the means by which these are identified and reconstructed. These, combined with story-telling and sensitivity to social context, assure the relevance of the material; because these are subjects that, for all their importance, are rarely explicitly discussed from this perspective.